Would you spend money buying nothing? By this I don’t mean money spent in games for items but actually spending money to receive nothing. Living in this generation, it’s hard to ignore the presence of non-fungible tokens, also known as NFTs. An NFT is a unique digital token that serves as the proof of ownership stored in a blockchain, a form of digital ledger. 

Each NFT is different, and its difference is what sets it apart from cryptocurrency like Bitcoins. With an NFT purchase, the buyer is granted some of the fundamental rights such as posting the image online, or using it as a profile picture. That pretty much concludes the use of an NFT, unless you are planning to resell it for a higher price.

The artist gets paid royalties on secondary sales, so every time an NFT is traded from one to another, the artist will always get a cut of the profits since they are the one who created it.

With the increasing influence of NFTs, it has also led to more job creation, such as in the case of “Axie Infinity,” an NFT game where players spend money to raise Axies. Since the game’s economy is entirely NFT-based, playing has become a full time job for many in the Philippines and Venezuela, according to rest of world. Players in these countries made up around half of the player base, however with the increase in game popularity, it has become harder to make a living out of the game.

There are also numerous cases of NFT scams resulting in the loss of  millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. With a total amount of 2.8 billion dollars from NFT scams being pulled off in 2021 according to Chainsalysis, it’s clear  NFTs are not a useful form of technology but rather  a financial instrument to make profits off. With programming scripts generating thousands of NFTs in just seconds, developers have created artificial scarcity to inflate the value of these digital assets.

Unfortunately, government digital regulations have yet to catch up with these scandals and NFTs are still struggling to find a use beyond being a speculative profiteering engine. In the current generation surrounding NFT, one should have done a decent amount of research regarding the background of the creator and it’s position in the current economy.